The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery today announced a gift of 374 ancient Arabian artifacts from the American Foundation for the Study of Man (AFSM). Dating from the eighth century B.C. to the second century A.D., the objects were unearthed at the ancient city of Tamna in Yemen and provide invaluable insight into the little-known history of the southern Arabian Peninsula. The collection was assembled by American archaeology pioneer Wendell Phillips in the early 1950s. Together with a team of renowned archaeologists, Phillips compiled thorough excavation records, creating one of the few fully documented collections of Qataban artifacts available to researchers that are invaluable to future study of the region.
The donation of the complete Qataban collection to the Sackler is made possible by Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, president of the AFSM and sister of the late Wendell Phillips.
“This collection provides the Sackler with a tremendous opportunity to shed light on the rich history and culture of ancient Arabia, and to do so through the discoveries of one of the most remarkable early archeologists, Wendell Phillips,” said Julian Raby, The Dame Jillian Sackler Director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art.
Once admired for its fragrant and abundant foliage and lush pastures, the Qataban empire of the late first millennium B.C. was a hub of cultural exchange, central to the ancient trade routes that extended from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. Tamna was its bustling capital city and reached its peak between the fifth century B.C. and first century A.D., when a mysterious catastrophic fire destroyed the city, leaving it buried under layers of ash and sand for almost two millennia.
Tamna remained largely undiscovered until the 1950s, when Phillips, a paleontologist, geologist and a self-taught archaeologist, gathered a team and began systematic excavations to unearth and record artifacts using methods that are standard archaeological practices today. His technical methods in excavation and detailed field notes have been critical to the study of ancient Arabia and have laid the groundwork for more recent explorations. Highlights among Phillips’ discoveries are a pair of striking bronze lions with the figure of Eros, the Greek god of love, on their backs. Known as the “Lions of Tamna,” the skillfully cast sculptural forms exemplify the vibrant cultural exchange between the Qataban and Greek empires. Another collection highlight is a translucent alabaster head of a young woman, with lapis lazuli eyebrows and an Egyptian-style hairstyle. Unearthed in the cemetery of Tamna, the head was named “Miriam” after the daughter of a member of the expedition.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________One of a pair of large bronze high reliefs each in the form of a striding lioness surmounted by a figure of Eros. 1st century B.C.E.-mid-1st century C.E., Yemen. Bronze Gift of The American Foundation for the Study of Man (Wendell and Merilyn Phillips Collection) S2013.202
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Head of a woman (known as Miriam). Mid-1st century, Yemen. Alabaster, stucco and lapis lazuli. Gift of The American Foundation for the Study of Man (Wendell and Merilyn Phillips Collection) S2013.2.44
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In 1949, Phillips founded the American Foundation for the Study of Man with the mission to “conduct scientific research, study and investigate man and his habitats with emphasis on archaeological investigation, excavation, preservation, analysis and dissemination of scientific results.” The collection is part of the AFSM, originally founded in Washington, D.C., and currently based in Falls Church, Va.
Selections from the collection were on view in the Sackler’s 2005 exhibition “Caravan Kingdoms: Yemen and the Ancient Incense Trade.” The Qataban empire is one of the least known of the ancient South Arabian empires. This collection holds potential for new research and discovery and is a window into an almost forgotten ancient civilization. In celebration of the AFSM’s gift, the Sackler will mount an exhibition of collection highlights in 2014, while planning further touring exhibitions and conferences, workshops and public programs to encourage the study and research of this remarkable group of works.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, located at 1050 Independence Avenue S.W., and the adjacent Freer Gallery of Art, located at 12th Street and Independence Avenue S.W., are on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. every day (closed Dec. 25), and admission is free. For more information about the Freer and Sackler galleries and their exhibitions, programs and other public events, visit www.asia.si.edu.

Excavations have begun anew at one of Turkey’s most impressive tourist sites, the ancient city of Ani, which straddles the border between Turkey and Armenia in the eastern province of Kars.

“When we speak of Ani, we call it an ‘iceberg.’ The visible surface is one-tenth of the invisible face of Ani. This is why the invisible side is important of Ani. Hopefully, the invisible side will come to light during the upcoming excavations.

The most recent excavation was done in 2011. Two years on, we are doing our excavation with a grant of 110,000 Turkish liras. After creating a team headed by our museum directorate, we will start the excavation as soon as possible,” said Kars Culture and Tourism Director Hakan Doğanay.

Doğanay said four excavations have so far been conducted in Ani, adding that the last excavation was conducted in 2010, adding that it was impossible to bring Ani to light with just three or four excavations.

“Russians conducted excavations for 14 years in Kars while Kars was under Russian occupation for 40 years. The valuable artifacts were taken during this process. According to a rumor, four wagons of artwork were taken to Russia. Many artifacts are in the Moscow Museum,” he said.

He said the excavation would be conducted under the supervision of Associate Professor Fahriye Bayram of Pamukkale University and her team.

The discovery in Peru of another tomb belonging to a pre-Hispanic priestess, the eighth in more than two decades, confirms that powerful women ruled this region 1,200 years ago, archeologists said.

The remains of the woman from the Moche—or Mochica—civilization were discovered in late July in an area called La Libertad in the country's northern Chepan province.
It is one of several finds in this region that have amazed scientists. In 2006, researchers came across the famous "Lady of Cao"—who died about 1,700 years ago and is seen as one of the first female rulers in Peru.
"This find makes it clear that women didn't just run rituals in this area but governed here and were queens of Mochica society," project director Luis Jaime Castillo told AFP.
"It is the eighth priestess to be discovered," he added. "Our excavations have only turned up tombs with women, never men."
The priestess was in an "impressive 1,200-year-old burial chamber" the archeologist said, pointing out that the Mochica were known as master craftsmen.
"The burial chamber of the priestess is 'L'-shaped and made of clay, covered with copper plates in the form of waves and sea birds," Castillo said.
Near the neck is a mask and a knife, he added.

View of one of two skeletons found in a burial chamber of the Moche culture (between 200-700 AD), in the Cao religious compound, close to the city of Trujillo, Peru, on August 3, 2013. The tomb, decorated with pictures in red and yellow, also has ceramic offerings—mostly small vases—hidden in about 10 niches on the side.
"Accompanying the priestess are bodies of five children, two of them babies, and two adults, all of whom were sacrificed," Castillo said, noting there were two feathers atop the coffin.
Julio Saldana, the archeologist responsible for work in the burial chamber, said the discovery of the tomb confirms the village of San Jose de Moro is a cemetery of the Mochica elite, with the most impressive tombs belonging to women.

sábado, 10 de agosto de 2013

The city has become an archaeological site, with thousands of artifacts such as an 18th-century bone toothbrush with animal hair bristles and wine and champagne bottles corked centuries ago unearthed to prove it.

A copper half-penny and a pair of children's shoes are some of the other remnants of early New York life workers discovered in lower Manhattan while digging to install new utilities for the growing residential and business South Street Seaport area.
Last week, under a 15-foot (4.6-meter) stretch of Fulton Street, near Wall Street, more than 100 liquor bottles from the 18th century popped up, some still intact and corked, as first reported by the news website DNAinfo.com.
Archaeologist Alyssa Loorya, whose Brooklyn firm is overseeing the financial district excavation, said, "You never know what you'll find right underneath your feet in this city."
"Finding the bits and pieces that were actually used by the people in the past makes New York City's history real," Loorya said Wednesday. "George Washington lived right near here."

The ordinary objects paint an extraordinary picture of the city in the 1700s and 1800s—a community of Dutch and English settlers who hadn't yet spread north into what is today's Manhattan. The budding metropolis and its water-borne trade was still expanding into the East River and harbor with landfills for wharves using whatever was available, including some newly found artifacts that had become garbageOn a summer afternoon, Loorya stood on Fulton Street looking over a table of dirt-caked treasures, surrounded by towering office buildings, luxury residential skyscrapers and refurbished old merchants' houses and stores. The buildings rwater pipes now filling the space where the treasure trove was found near the edge of the city's original shoreline.

ise above the pit dug into the cobblestone pavement for the crisscrossing electrical wires and
Last October, at the peak of Superstorm Sandy, flood waters again surged up to that spot.

The most recent archaeological pay dirt was hundreds of bottle pieces, including those found last week, from pubs and taverns that had been watering holes for soldiers and sailors passing through.

The day before the child's death was not a pleasant one, because it was not a sudden injury that killed the 10-13 year old child who was buried in the medieval town of Ribe in Denmark 800 years ago. The day before death was full of suffering because the child had been given a large dose of mercury in an attempt to cure a severe illness.
This is now known to chemist Kaare Lund Rasmussen from University of Southern Denmark – because he and his colleagues have developed a new methodology that can reveal an unheard amount of details from very shortly before a person's death. Mercury is of particular interest for the archaeologists as many cultures in different part of the world have been in contact with this rare element.
"I cannot say which diseases the child had contracted. But I can say that it was exposed to a large dose of mercury a couple of months before its death and again a day or two prior to death. You can imagine what happened: that the family for a while tried to cure the child with mercury containing medicine which may or may not have worked, but that the child's condition suddenly worsened and that it was administered a large dose of mercury which was, however, not able to save its life", says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.
The detailed insight into the life of the child did not come from analyses of the child's bones. Instead Kaare Lund Rasmussen and his colleagues have developed a method to extract information from the soil surrounding the body of the dead child in the cemetery in Ribe, Denmark.
"When the body decays in the grave a lot of compounds are released to the surrounding soil – by far most of them organic compounds. Also most of the inorganic elements are transformed to other compounds and later removed by the percolating groundwater throughout the centuries that follows. If we can localize an element in the soil in the immediate vicinity of the skeleton which is not normally found in the soil itself, we can assume that it came from the deceased and this can tell us something about how the person lived. We are not interested in death, but in the life before death", Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.

IMAGE:This image shows the principles of taking soil samples for mercury analysis. The holes show the positions of soil samples taken in the mid-plane of compacted corpse. The holes are...

Mercury in particular is worth looking for, he explains. This element is very rare in normal soil, but has been used in several cultures worldwide, and it is therefore expected sometimes to be found in archaeological excavations in a variety of places like Italy, China, Central America and - as it appears - also in medieval Denmark. In medieval Europe mercury was used for centuries in the colour pigment cinnabar, which was used for illuminating manuscripts by medieval monks, and since Roman times mercury was widely used as the active ingredient in medicine administered against a variety of diseases.
"Mercury is extremely toxic and surely some died from mercury poisoning and not the ailment it was meant to cure. Treatment with mercury was practiced well into the 1900's, where for instance the Danish novelist Karen Blixen (Seven Gothic Tales) received treatment in 1914", says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.
"Concerning past archaeological excavations it is appalling to think about all the soil that archaeologists have wheel barrowed away for more than a century – if we had samples of this soil, we would have access to a lot of important information", he says.
The soil samples must be taken precisely in the position of the original tissue, e.g. inner organs or muscle tissue where there is now only soil to be seen.
"At the position of a kidney, which is now completely decayed, compounds originally sitting in the kidney tissue are now part of the soil, if it has not been transported away by the groundwater. If there was mercury present in the kidney at the time of death it would have been transformed rapidly to mercury sulphide which is very immobile and undissolvable in water. So in this way we can obtain information about the deceased even though we do not analyse the bones", Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.

IMAGE:Associate professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen, University of Southern Denmark, holds the soil sample from which the mercury traces was retrieved.

In the town of Ribe the chemists have been assisted by anthropologists to take soil samples from the places originally occupied by the mercury poisoned child's lungs, kidneys, liver and muscle tissue. As the half-life of mercury varies between the different tissue types, Kaare Lund Rasmussen can ascertain when the body was last exposed to mercury prior to death.
The mercury concentration is for instance excreted very fast from the lungs, within hours or at the most a couple of days, and it is therefore a question of hours or at the most a couple of days before most of the mercury has vanished from the lungs after inhaling mercury vapour.
"When we found high mercury concentrations in the soil that had once been the lungs of the child, we could conclude that the child probably was exposed to mercury within the last 48 hours or so before its death" says Kaare Lund Rasmussen.
It is also possible to test the bones for their content of excess mercury, and this technique has been used by archaeologists for several years now.
"But there are certain limitations to what the bones can reveal; while the soil give insight into the last months and days before death, the bones can only give information about the mercury exposure from ca. ten to three years prior to death", Kaare Lund Rasmussen explains.
Kaare Lund Rasmussen and his colleagues have used their newly developed sampling technique on soil samples from 19 medieval burials in the cemeteries Lindegaarden in Ribe and Ole Wormsgade in Horsens, Denmark.

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Contact:
Associate professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen
Dept. of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy
T: + 45 2871 3709
E: klr@sdu.dk.
The results are published in the journal Heritage Science, 2013,1:16.
The work is part of a new research project,"People in Ribe in a 1000 years", supported by the VELUX Foundation. Besides the chemists from University of Southern Denmark, anthropologists from University of Southern Denmark and archaeologists from Sydvestjyske Museer also participate in the research.
This press release was written by press officer Birgitte Svennevig.Photos:
1: The principles of taking soil samples for mercury analysis. The holes show the positions of soil samples taken in the mid-plane of compacted corpse. The holes are placed in the position of the lungs, liver, kidney and the muscles of the upper arm. Photo: County Museums of Odense.
2: Associate professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen in his lab examining a medieval skull. Photo: Birgitte Svennevig/SDU.
3: The remains of a 10-13 year old child from the cemetery Lindegaarden in Ribe, Denmark. The grave is from ca. 1200-1250 and has been excavated by Sydvestjyske Museer in Ribe. Photo: Sydvestjyske Museer.
4: Associate professor Kaare Lund Rasmussen holds the soil sample from which the mercury traces was retrieved. Photo: Birgitte Svennevig/SDU.
High res versions available from press officer Birgitte Svennevig, birs@sdu.dk